The key to obtaining this data is outstanding customer engagement, according to Patrick Bewley, CEO of Big Cloud Analytics. He believes that great customer experience is the lead to accessing the data necessary for proper and wide-scale risk assessment. His app, which is called EVO, offers bio-sensor analytics via a real time SaaS platform, scoring, messaging and alerts for the insurance sector.

The idea behind it is that while people may not use wearable devices, everybody has an iphone, and carries it around pretty much constantly... allowing health data to stream with little effort.

What he learned during his first years of business is that paying individuals to change their behavior may work, but only in the short run. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work for customer journeys, and customer experience is actually a very complex task. The motivation for wellness is deeply intrinsic, personal journey that depends heavily on one's psychological makeup, family upbringing, and outlook on life. On the other hand, through excellent customer journeys, he believes that there is an opportunity for customers to engage long-term with a corporate brand.

There is a general consensus among experts that wearables will not replace traditional underwriting methods, but they will instead add another dimension to the overall risk assessment puzzle. The big question lies around which kind of customer data is most reliable.

Bewley used his EVO app to capture the number of steps a customer took as one barometer of a customer's general health. However, the health data collected through the app is often inconsistent, short-sighted and easy to manipulate, and as Bewley noted, even when financially incentivized, you can only get people to change their lifestyle for a short period of time. To overcome this challenge, Bewley defines 8 archetypes of customers and depending on each profile, the motivating incentives are different.

We all want customer engagement, but this often doesn't match up with what actually happens. People seem to be either too lazy or uninterested (or both) in order to engage with wearables for the long-term. Apps like EVO may be an answer.

What do you think? How can we engage better with customers in order to obtain the high-quality data that would actually benefit risk assessment for the insurance sector?